Rate My Professor Margarethe McDonald

Margarethe McDonald is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing: Sciences and Disorders at the University of Kansas, where she began her position in 2023. She serves as the Director of the Speech in Little Bilinguals Lab (SLBL). Prior to joining KU, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Ottawa and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020. Her academic training has equipped her to investigate complex aspects of speech development in diverse linguistic environments.

McDonald's research centers on bilingual speech production and perception in children, with particular emphasis on the effects of exposure to accented speech on phonetic and phonological development. Her work seeks to develop assessment tools for speech and language abilities in children who speak languages without established normed measures. Ongoing projects in the SLBL explore Korean-English bilingual speech development, including cross-linguistic perception-production links; Vietnamese-English bilingual speech accuracy in shared and unshared sounds using standardized tests; interactions between American Sign Language and spoken English in bimodal bilinguals; and children's learning of sounds from native and non-native speech contexts. These efforts aim to support evidence-based clinical decisions for bilingual populations, mitigating risks of misdiagnosis due to diverse language exposure paths and limited expertise in non-English/Spanish languages. In 2024, she was awarded the New Century Scholars Research Grant from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation for her project titled "Predicting Experience-Specific Bilingual Speech Production With Machine Learning." Key publications include "Bilingual Children Shift and Relax Second-Language Phoneme Categorization in Response to Accented L2 and Native L1 Speech Exposure" (2023), "Distributional learning of bimodal and trimodal phoneme categories in monolingual and bilingual infants" (2024), "Evaluating the Language ENvironment Analysis System for Korean" (2021), "Developmental change in children’s speech processing of auditory and visual cues: An eyetracking study" (2021), and "Factors modulating cross-linguistic co-activation in bilinguals" (2020). Her contributions advance understanding of bilingual language acquisition and inform clinical practices in speech-language pathology.